How to Learn New Drum Patterns – FAST!

So you’re in the lab cooking up some new 🔥.

You’ve laid a sick chord progression and you’re ready to add some banging drums!

The drum pattern you’ve put down is cool, but it’s flat. Something is out of place.

The beat is nice but it doesn’t have your head nodding back and forth yet.

You start to panic because your new artist has a deadline that’s quickly approaching.

The last batch of beats you sent out were straight bangers! So you know you GOTTA come with that heat rock again.

And there’s no way you can disappoint.

But after a couple of hours in the lab, you still can’t figure out what your drums are missing, and you don’t know what to do……

To all my fellow producers out there. Have you ever been in this predicament?

I have, and more times than I want to remember.

That’s why I know what your drums are missing because I’ve been there, in your shoes.

But no worries. I’m gonna tell you how to fix this issue in just 6 quick and easy steps.

Before I go any further, let’s be clear.

In the example I provided earlier, the drums were missing one key ingredient.

That bounce.

I learned from a very successful producer years ago that if your drums don’t bounce, then they ain’t gonna bang.

Point blank period.

Nowadays, you can use pretty much any DAW out there to add bounce to your drums. But today I’m going to focus on Reason Studio.

I’ve used Reason for years because of their warm synths and plush pads. But I learned a couple of years ago that they discovered a new way to add bounce to tracks.

So without further ado, I introduce you to the Reason Regroove.

Regroove is pretty dope because allows you to intimately adjust your drum’s parameters. In my experience, Regroove works particularly well with hip-hop, r&b, dancehall, and boom-bap music.

Here’s how.

1). Once you open Reason, you’ll want to load their flagship drum machine, the Reason Redrum.

Now don’t get it twisted, the Redrum allows you to tweak your drum patterns, but it doesn’t give you the same control as the Regroove.

The Redrum loads with a default drum pattern that you can edit and change whenever you like. But we’ll use this pattern for now for the sake of this tutorial.

2) Next, you’ll open up Regroove from the bottom left corner of the transport bar.

3) Now we’ll need to assign the drum pattern that’s loaded in Redrum to a Regroove lane to connect them. In this example, we’ll be using lane 1.

4) Regroove comes with a ton of settings, or ‘patches‘ that you can load. Each one is designed to give the drum pattern you created in Redrum a distinct feel or bounce.

You can click the folder icon in lane 1 to bring this window up.

5) Now you’ll see a list of patches that you can use. I’m an MPC head, so naturally, I’m partial to their patches. But feel free to choose whichever one you’re feeling at the moment.

6) You should instantly hear a difference in the bounce and swing of your drums. But you can tweak this even more by adust the Shuffle and Slide knobs.

Can you hear that? This is so sick!

I’ve used this technique to make some complex west coast boom-bap and r&b drum patterns. The example I used was from Reason’s very own Youtube tutorial.

You can also check out Jelie from Kickback Couture’s Regroove tutorial here. It’s insane!

So there you have it! You’ve just learned how to add crazy feel and mass appeal to your drums with Reason Regroove. I bet they’re bouncing off the walls now!